Postmodernism is highly debated even among postmodernists
themselves. For an initial characterization of its basic premises, consider anthropological critic
Melford Spiro's excellent synopsis of the basic tenets of postmodernism:

The
postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated arguments, epistemological
and ideological. Both are based on subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the
human object, anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a science;
and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject precludes the possibility of
science discovering objective truth. Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science
according to the ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females,
ethnics, third-world peoples (Spiro 1996).

Modernity Modernity came into being with the Renaissance.
Modernity implies the progressive economic and administrative rationalization and
differentiation of the social world (Sarup 1993). In essence this term emerged in the context of the development of the capitalist state. Anthropologists have been
working towards studying modern times, but have now gone past that. The fundamental act of
modernity is to question the foundations of past knowledge.

Postmodernity Logically postmodernism literally means after modernity. It refers to the incipient or actual
dissolution of those social forms associated with modernity" (Sarup 1993).

Modernization This term is often used to refer to the
stages of social development which are based upon industrialization. Modernization is a
diverse unity of socio-economic changes generated by scientific and technological
discoveries and innovations... (Sarup 1993).

Modernism Modernism is an experiment in finding the inner
truths of a situation. It can be characterized by self-consciousness and
reflexiveness. This is very closely related to Postmodernism (Sarup 1993).

Postmodernism (For more information see Comments Section)

There is a sense in which if one sees modernism as the culture
of modernity, postmodernism is the culture of postmodernity (Sarup 1993).

Modern, overloaded individuals, desperately trying to maintain
rootedness and integrity...ultimately are pushed to the point where there is little reason
not to believe that all value-orientations are equally well-founded. Therefore,
increasingly, choice becomes meaningless. According to Baudrillard (1984: 38-9), we must
now come to terms with the second revolution, that of the Twentieth Century, of
postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning equal to the
earlier destruction of appearances. Whoever lives by meaning dies by meaning" (Ashley
1990).

Ryan Bishop, in a concise article in the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (1996),
defines post-modernism as an eclectic movement, originating in aesthetics, architecture
and philosophy. Postmodernism espouses a systematic skepticism of grounded theoretical
perspectives. Applied to anthropology, this skepticism has shifted focus from the observation of
a particular society to the observation of the (anthropological) observer.

Postmodernity concentrates on the tensions of difference and
similarity erupting from processes of globalization: the the accelerating circulation of people,
the increasingly dense and frequent cross-cultural interactions, and the unavoidable intersections of local and global knowledge.

"Postmodernists are suspicious of authoritative definitions and
singular narratives of any trajectory of events. (Bishop 1996: 993). Post-modern attacks
on ethnography are based on the belief that there is no true objectivity. The authentic implementation of the scientific
method is impossible.

According to Rosenau, postmodernists can be divided into two very broad camps, Skeptics
and Affirmatives.

Skeptical Postmodernists-
They are extremely critical of the
modern subject. They consider the subject to be a linguistic convention
(Rosenau 1992:43). They also reject any understanding of time because for them the modern
understanding of time is oppressive in that it controls and measures individuals. They
reject Theory because theories are abundant, and no theory is considered more correct that
any other. They feel that theory conceals, distorts, and obfuscates, it is
alienated, disparated, dissonant, it means to exclude, order, and control rival
powers (Rosenau 1992: 81).

Affirmative Postmodernists- Affirmatives also reject Theory by
denying claims of truth. They do not, however, feel that Theory needs to be abolished but
merely transformed. Affirmatives are less rigid than Skeptics. They support movements
organized around peace, environment, and feminism (Rosenau 1993: 42).

Here are some proposed differences between modern and postmodern thought.

Contrast of Modern
and Postmodern Thinking

Modern

Postmodern

Reasoning

From foundation upwards

Multiple factors of multiple levels of
reasoning. Web-oriented.

Science

Universal Optimism

Realism of Limitations

Part/Whole

Parts comprise the whole

The whole is more than the parts

God

Acts by violating "natural"
laws" or by "immanence" in everything that is

"Modernity" takes its Latin origin from modo, which means just now. The Postmodern,, then literally means
after just now Appignanesi and Garratt 1995). Points of reaction from within
postmodernism are associated with other posts: postcolonialism and
poststructuralism.

Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism has been defined as:

1. A description of institutional conditions in formerly colonial societies.
2. An abstract representation of the global situation after the colonial period.
3. A description of discourses informed by psychological and epistemological orientations.

Edward Saids Culture and Imperialism (1993) represents discourse
analysis and postcolonial theory as tools for rethinking forms of knowledge and the social
identities of postcolonial systems. An important feature of postcolonialist thought is its assertion that modernism and modernity are part of the colonial project of domination.

Debates about Postcolonialism are unresolved, yet issues raised in
Saids Orientalism (1978), a critique of Western descriptions of Non-Euro-American Others, suggest that colonialism as a discourse is based
on the ability of Westerners to examine other societies in order to produce knowledge and use it as a form of power deployed against the very subjects of inquiry. As should be readily apparent, the issues of postcolonialism are uncomfortably relevant to
contemporary anthropological investigations.

Poststructuralism

In reaction to the abstraction of cultural data characteristic of
model building, cultural relativists argue that model building hindered understanding of
thought and action. From this claim arose poststructuralist concepts such as developed in the work of
Pierre Bourdieu (1972). He asserts that structural models should not be replaced
but enriched. Post structuralist like Bourdieu are concerned with reflexivity and the
search for logical practice. By doing so, accounts of the participants' behavior and
meanings are not objectified by the observer. (For definition of reflexivity, see key
concepts)

Leading
Figures

Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern would be that
which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses
the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common
experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations--not to
take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something
unpresentable. Lyotard attacks many of the modern age traditions, such as the
"Grand" Narrative or what Lyotard termed the Meta(master) narrative (Lyotard
1984). In contrast to the ethnographies written by anthropologists in the first half of
the 20th Century, Lyotard states that an all encompasing account of a culture cannot
be accomplished.

Jean Baudrillard Baudrillard is a sociologist who
began his career exploring the Marxist critique of capitalism (Sarup 1993: 161).
During this phase of his work he argued that, consumer objects constitute a system
of signs that differentiate the population (Sarup 1993: 162). Eventually, however, Baudrillard
felt that Marxist tenets did not effectively evaluate commodities, so he turned to
postmodernism. Rosenau labels Baudrillard as a skeptical postmodernist because ofstatements like,
everything has already happened....nothing new can occur,  or there is
no real world (Rosenau 1992: 64, 110). Baudrillard breaks down modernity and
postmodernity in an effort to explain the world as a set of models. He identifies early
modernity as the period between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, modernity
as the period at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and postmodernity as the period
of mass media (cinema and photography). Baudrillard states that we live in a world of
images but images that are only simulations. Baudrillard implies that many people fail to understand this
concept that, we have now moved into an epoch...where truth is entirely a product of
consensus values, and where science itself is just the name we attach to
certain modes of explanation, (Norris 1990: 169).

Jacques Derrida (1930 - ) Derrida is identified as a
poststructuralist and a skeptical postmodernist. Much of his writing is concerned
with the deconstruction of texts and probing the relationship of meaning between texts (Bishop 1996:
1270). He observes that a text employs its own strategems against it, producing a force of
dislocation that spreads itself through an entire system. (Rosenau 1993: 120).
Derrida directly attacks Western philosophy's understanding of reason. He sees reason as
dominated by a metaphysics of presence. Derrida agrees with structuralism's
insight, that meaning is not inherent in signs, but he proposes that it is incorrect to
infer that anything reasoned can be used as a stable and timeless model (Appignanesi 1995:
77). He tries to problematize the grounds of reason, truth, and knowledge...he
questions the highest point by demanding reasoning for reasoning itself, (Norris
1990: 199).

Michel Foucault (1926- 1984) Foucault was a French
philosopher who attempted to show that what most people think of as the permanent
truths of human nature and society actually change throughout the course of history. While
challenging the influences of Marx and Freud, Foucault postulated that everyday practices
enabled people to define their identities and systemize knowledge. Foucaults study
of power and its shifting patterns is one of the foundations of postmodernism. Foucault is
considered a postmodern theorist precisely because his work upsets the conventional understanding of
history as a chronology of inevitable facts. Alternatively, he depicts history as underlayers of suppressed
and unconscious knowledge in and throughout history. These underlayers are the codes and
assumptions of order, the structures of exclusion, that legitimate the epistemes by which
societies achieve identities (Appignanesi 1995: 83, http://www.connect.net/ron).

Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1944-) She is a professor of
Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. In her work "Primacy of the
Ethical" Scheper-Hughes argues that, "If we cannot begin to think about social
institutions and practices in moral or ethical terms, then anthropology strikes me as
quite weak and useless." (1995: 410). She advocates that ethnographies be used as
tools for critical reflection and human liberation because she feels that
"ethics" make culture possible. Since culture is preceded by ethics, therefore
ethics cannot be culturally bound as argued by anthropologists in the past. These
philosophies are evident in her other works such as, "Death Without Weeping."
The crux of her postmodern perspective is that, "Anthropologists, no less than any
other professionals, should be held accountable for how we have used and how we have
failed to use anthropology as a critical tool at crucial historical moments. It is the act
of "witnessing" that lends our word its moral, at times almost theological,
character." (1995: 419)

Key Works

Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon.

Tyler, Stephen (1986) Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the
Occult To Occult Document. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,
ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Vattimo, Gianni (1988) The End of Modernity: Nihilism and
Hermeneutics. In Post-Modern Critique. London: Polity.

Principal
Concepts

Realism ...is the platonic doctrine that universals or
abstractions have being independently of mind (Gellner 1980: 60).

Realism is a mode of writing that seeks to represent the
reality of the whole world or form of life. Realist ethnographies are written to allude to
a whole by means of parts or foci of analytical attention which can constantly evoke a
social and cultural totality. (Marcus and Fischer 1986, p.23).

Self-Reflexivity Reflexivity can be defined as The
scientific observer's objectification of structure as well as strategy was seen as placing
the actors in a framework not of their own making but one produced by the observer, 
(Bishop 1996: 1270). Self-Reflexivity leads to a consciousness of the process of knowledge
creation (Bishop 1996: 995). It emphasizes the point of theoretical and practical questioning
changing the ethnographers' view of themselves and their work. There is an increased
awareness of the collection of data and the limitation of methodological systems. This
idea underlies the postmodernist affinity for studying the culture of anthropology and ethnography.

Relativism Gellner writes about the relativistic-functionalist
view of thought that goes back to the Enlightment: "The (unresolved) dilemma, which
the thought of the Enlightenment faced, was between a relativistic-functionalist view of
thought, and the absolutist claims of enlightened Reason. Viewing man as part of
nature...requires (us) to see cognitive and evaluative activities as part of nature too, and
hence varying from organism to organism and context to context. (Clifford & Marcus (eds), 1986, p.147).
Anthropological theory of the 1960's may be best understood as the heir of relativism.
Contenporary interpretative anthropology is the essence of
relativism as a mode of inquiry about communication in and between cultures (Marcus &
Fischer, 1986, p.32).

Methodologies

One of the essential
elements of Postmodernism is that it constitutes an attack against theory and
methodology. In a
sense proponents claim to relinquish all attempts to create new knowledge in a systematic
fashion, but substitutes an anti-rules fashion of discourse(Rosenau p.117). Despite this claim, however, there are
two methodologies characteristic of Postmodernism. These methodologies are interdependent
in that Interpretation is inherent in Deconstruction. Post-modern methodology is
post-positivist or anti-positivist. As substitutes for the scientific method the
affirmatives look to feelings and personal experience.....the skeptical post modernists
most of the substitutes for method because they argue we can never really know
anything (Rosenau 1993, p.117).

Deconstruction Deconstruction emphasizes negative critical
capacity. Deconstruction involves demystifying a text to reveal internal arbitrary
hierarchies and presuppositions. By examining the margins of a text, the effort of
deconstruction examines what it represses, what it does not say, and its incongruities. It
does not solely unmask error, but redefines the text by undoing and reversing polar
opposites. Deconstruction does not resolve inconsistencies, but rather exposes hierarchies
involved for the distillation of information .

Rosenaus Guidelines for Deconstruction Analysis:

Find an exception to a generalization in a text and push it to the
limit so that this generalization appears absurd. Use the exception to undermine the
principle.

Interpret the arguments in a text being deconstructed in their most
extreme form.

Avoid absolute statements and cultivate intellectual excitement by
making statements that are both startling and sensational.

Deny the legitimacy of dichotomies because there are always a few
exceptions.

Nothing is to be accepted, nothing is to be rejected. It is extremely
difficult to criticize a deconstructive argument if no clear viewpoint is expressed.

Write so as to permit the greatest number of interpretations
possible.....Obscurity may protect from serious scrutiny (Ellis 1989: 148).
The idea is to create a text without finality or completion, one with which the
reader can never be finished (Wellberg, 1985: 234).

Employ new and unusual terminology in order that familiar
positions may not seem too familiar and otherwise obvious scholarship may not seem so
obviously relevant(Ellis 1989: 142).

Never consent to a change of terminology and always insist that
the wording of the deconstructive argument is sacrosanct. More familiar formulations
undermine any sense that the deconstructive position is unique (Ellis 1989: 145). (Rosenau
1993, p.121)

Intuitive Interpretation Postmodern interpretation is
introspective and anti-objectivist which is a form of individualized understanding. It is
more a vision than data observation. In anthropology interpretation gravitates toward
narrative and centers on listening to and talking with the other, (Rosenau 1993,
p.119). For postmodernists there are an endless number of interpretations. Foucault argues
that everything is interpretation (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 106). There is no final
meaning for any particular sign, no notion of unitary sense of text, no interpretation can
be regarded as superior to any other (Latour 1988: 182-3). Anti-positivists defend the
notion that every interpretation is false. Interpretative anthropology is a covering
label for a diverse set of reflections upon the practice of ethnography and the concept of
culture (Marcus and Fisher 1986: 60)

Accomplishments

Demystification Perhaps the greatest accomplishments of
postmodernism is the focus upon uncovering and criticizing the epistemological and ideological motivations in the social
sciences.

Critical Examination of Ethnographic Explanation
The unrelenting re-examination
of the nature of ethnography inevitably leads to a questioning of ethnography itself as a mode of
cultural analysis. Postmodernism adamantly insists that anthropologists must consider the
role of their own culture in the explanation of the "other" cultures being studied. Postmodernist
theory has led to a heightened sensitivity within anthropology to the collection of data.

Criticisms

Roy DAndrade (1931-) In the article "Moral
Models in Anthropology," D'Andrade critiques postmodernism's definition of objectivity and
subjectivity by examining the moral nature of their models. He argues that these moral
models are purely subjective. D'Andrade argues that despite the fact that utterly value-free objectivity is impossible, it is
the goal of the anthropologist to get as close as possible to that ideal. He argues that there must be a
separation between moral and objective models because they are counterproductive in
discovering how the world works. (DAndrade 1995: 402). From there he takes
issue with the postmodernist attack on objectivity. He states that objectivity is in no
way dehumanizing nor is objectivity impossible. He states, Science works not because
it produces unbiased accounts but because its accounts are objective enough to be proved
or disproved no matter what anyone wants to be true. (DAndrade 1995: 404).

Rosenau (1993)identifies seven contradictions in
Postmodernism:

1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.
2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.
3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.
4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.
5. By adamently rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that
there are no valid criteria for judgement.
6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of
consistency itself.
7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

Melford Spiro argues that postmodern anthropologists do not convincingly
dismiss the scientific method. If anthropology turns away from the scientific method then
anthropology will become the study of meanings not the discovering of causes which shape
what it is to be human. Spiro further states that the causal account of culture
refers to ecological niches, modes of production, subsistence techniques, and so forth,
just as a causal account of mind refers to the firing of neurons, the secretions of
hormones, the action of neurotransmitters... .

1. Reality exists independently of human representations. If this is
true then, contrary to postmodernism, this postulate supports the existence of
mind-independent external reality which is called metaphysical
realism.
2. Language communicates meanings but also refers to objects and situations in the
world which exist independently of language. Contrary to postmodernism, this postulate
supports the concept of language as have communicative and referential functions.
3. Statements are true or false depending on whether the objects and situations to which
they refer correspond to a greater or lesser degree to the statements. This
correspondence theory of truth is to some extent the theory of truth for
postmodernists, but this concept is rejected by many postmodernists as
essentialist.
4. Knowledge is objective. This signifies that the truth of a knowledge claim is independent
of the motive, culture, or gender of the person who makes the claim. Knowledge depends on
empirical support.
5. Logic and rationality provide a set of procedures and methods, which contrary to
postmodernism, enables a researcher to assess competing knowledge claims through proof,
validity, and reason.
6. Objective and intersubjective criteria judge the merit of statements, theories,
interpretations, and all accounts.

Spiro specifically assaults the assumption that the disciplines that study humanity, like anthropology,
cannot be "scientific" because subjectivity renders observers incapable of discovering truth. Spiro
agrees with postmodernists that the social sciences require very different techniques for
the study of humanity than do the natural sciences, but while insight and empathy
are critical in the study of mind and culture...intellectual responsibility requires
objective (scientific methods) in the social sciences. Without objective procedures
ethnography is empirically dubious and intellectually irresponsible (Spiro 1996).

The Postmodernist genre of ethnography has been criticized for
fostering a self-indulgent subjectivity, and for exaggerating the esoteric and unique
aspects of a culture at the expense of more prosiac but significant questions. (Bishop
1996: 58)

Christopher Norris believes that Lyotard, Foucault, and Baudrillard
are too caught up in the idea of the primacy of moral judgments (Norris p.50). Also in
reaction to the Postmodern movement Marshall Sahlins addresses several post-modern issues
which includes the definition of power. "The current
Foucauldian-Gramscian-Nietzschean obsession with power is the lastest incarnation of
anthropology's incurable functionalism...Now 'power' is the intellectual black hole into
which all kinds of cultural contents get sucked, if before it was social solidarity or
material advantage." (Sahlins, 1993, p.15).

For more information on the foundational theories of Postmodernism,
Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Marxism, you may wish to reference such philosophers as
Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, and Kant. This information may be accessed easily from the this
Web site, http://www.connect/net/ron

Sources

Ashley, David (1990) Habermas and the Project of Modernity. In
Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity. Bryan Turner (ed). London: SAGE